


This Emptiness I Should Fill

by Chai_Teafling



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Amnesia, Anxiety Attacks, Character Study, Coping, Disassociation, Gen, He/Him Pronouns for Mollymauk Tealeaf, Pre-Canon, Self-Harm, self-expression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 08:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27729937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chai_Teafling/pseuds/Chai_Teafling
Summary: Empty. It’s a word with so many different meanings, depending on how you look at it.Empty: something that was once full, but no longer.Empty: something that is just waiting to be filled up.Empty: devoid of anything.Mollymauk Tealeaf was no stranger to emptiness, but his relationship with it fluctuated.
Relationships: Mollymauk Tealeaf & Yasha
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	This Emptiness I Should Fill

**Author's Note:**

> Please read all the tags! This work contains descriptions of self-harm and of difficult mental states and might be a painful read for some.
> 
> Title from ["This Emptiness" by Gojira.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxtGk9_qi4g)

Empty. It’s a word with so many different meanings, depending on how you look at it.

Empty: something that was once full, but no longer.

Empty: something that is just waiting to be filled up.

Empty: devoid of anything.

Mollymauk Tealeaf was no stranger to emptiness, but his relationship with it fluctuated.

At first, the emptiness was all-consuming. A true void. That time was dark, or so he’s been told. Devoid of memory, devoid of emotion, devoid of anything that showed a semblance of life besides the faint movement of breath and the occasional whispered word: _empty._

He can’t recall that time, not truly. When he tries, the memories slip away just as he touches their edges, like candle smoke or ink in water. He’s told that he moved like a puppet on strings back then, going where he was led and then stopping again, unnaturally still.

His first memories are of an emptiness that aches. He can recall watching the carnival troupe with detachment. An observer only, like a ghost. They spoke and sang and laughed and moved, and he could only watch as the void in his soul ached with longing. Was it an aching for a fullness lost, or an envy for a fullness not yet achieved? He does not know.

He remembers the first time that he felt the emptiness subside, just a little. He had been left to sit by the fading embers of the cookfire, and the clouds crossed the sky in the gentle breeze. The moon had come out, and it was so big, so beautiful, so ethereal. He sat in awe of it, entranced. Then someone had sat beside him, and talked to him for the first time like he was a real person.

“Have you heard about the Moonweaver?” they had asked. Of course he hadn’t; all he knew was the routine of carnival life. He didn’t answer. They told him anyway.

That compassion, that shred of humanity had filled him up, just the tiniest bit. He spent all of his time from that moment forward seeking it.

Though he had no words of his own yet, he sought out the words of others. His mind was empty of stories of his own life, so he let the people around him fill him with their own. Every tale, personal or historical, real or fictional, poured another bit of light into the empty vessel that was Mollymauk.

He started to feel more real once people began talking _to_ him instead of over him. Where once he had felt like a disconnected observer, a shade, now he felt like part of the world. He quickly took to eye contact, and after a few tentative touches, he began to crave bodily contact as well. If someone could see and touch him, he must be real, after all.

So this is how Molly filled the void and banished the emptiness: with people. He was lucky to have been found by carnival types, so full of stories, so casual with touch. Their presence helped pull him back to reality and ground him there.

That isn’t to say that the emptiness disappeared. At night, alone in his tent, he found himself drifting back out from his body. The quiet and the darkness and the lack of interaction left him without a tether, and in those times his mind would drift and he would realize just how very little he actually felt. Sleep was a blessing; at least that void passed as if in an instant.

Every morning, the sunlight and the soft sounds of the camp would slowly start to call him back to his body. Some days he would get up and go seek out comfort on his own, but others someone had to come collect him. Those days, it was like he was a puppet once again. He didn’t like those days, once he was grounded enough to feel.

The moment that things started to change for the better was the day that Yasha showed up. The carnival took her in even though they didn’t really have a place for her, and since none of the veterans wanted to room with a stranger, she was assigned to stay in Molly’s tent.

She was different from the others. A quiet soul, she didn’t mind Molly’s lack of words. She asked him questions and he would shake his head for yes or no. When she awoke to him curled on his bedroll one morning unresponsive, she didn’t just drag him to the camp cookery and force a bowl into his hands. She instead soothed him with soft words and gentle touches, until his eyes focused on her own and he responded to her questions. One night when he started to drift, she slid their bedrolls together and placed an arm over him. The weight pulled him back down to his body, and he slept easier than he could ever remember. He clung to her every night after that.

With Yasha around, he could be a person again. He could be present in his body, at least most of the time. With him not drifting around camp with a distant look in his eyes anymore, shy Toya even gained enough confidence to approach him.

Toya was timid to share her voice with most others, as she strained to be heard over them, but that wasn’t a concern with Molly. Neither of them had much of a job around camp, either, so they had plenty of time to get to know one another. Once they had bridged the initial gap and interacted for the first time, they became fast friends. Toya had never had anyone to play with, and Molly had never played. She taught him all sorts of games, and the emptiness filled up enough that he started to make sounds.

At first it was just laughs, when he was happiest. A rare sound, but coveted. But as Molly began to find his place among the others, he soon found himself wanting to hum with contentment, to huff with annoyance, to whine with sadness. Once the sounds came, words came quickly after.

His first words were “fuck off,” to everyone and no one’s surprise. The fact that he’d spoken at all was the surprise; the fact that “fuck off” was his reaction to the situation at hand was universally understood.

Once he started talking, Molly found he rather liked it. He still didn’t have much to say, given that he only knew a few months worth of life, but he took to mimicry like a bird to the skies. He sought out moments where he could slip in a quip at something, and every laugh he got for it filled the emptiness that much more.

Someone taught him tarot, and with it, how to bullshit. He practiced weaving narratives on carnival-goers in every town, never worrying for his mistakes. They’d be gone soon anyway, probably never to return. With all his experience listening around the fire, he learned to tell very good stories, and he used them to cover up the emptiness so that others wouldn’t see it. A crafted childhood to fill the space where his past should have been, and people were convinced that he was a whole person.

Even if sometimes he didn’t feel it.

One night as he watched Ornna change into her performance clothes and face paint, a little voice crawled into the back of his head. _How can you be real,_ it asked, _when you don’t even have possessions to mark your existence?_

He had looked down at Desmond’s borrowed shirt, Gustav’s borrowed trousers. They felt stifling, like he was suffocating beneath waves of ill-fitting linen. The rough weave dragged over his skin with every movement as he retreated from the tent and set his nerves aflame.

He hadn’t known that the store sold used clothes; in his panic, he didn’t take the time to sound out the letters on the sign. He just saw clothes, and they called to him like a beacon. Had he known that they once belonged to other people, real people, he probably would have cast them off as if they burned him. But he had never experienced new clothes, and he didn’t know the difference.

He filled his arms with fabrics in wild colours that would draw the eye. The fear of fading away was peaking, and so he scrabbled to find a way to command attention. To prove his realness.

Then he set about marking them, lest he did disappear like the shade he sometimes felt to be. With a needle and some thick thread, he wove his initials into every piece. Somewhere hidden, but somewhere it could be seen if he dematerialized and left no trace but a small pile of belongings.

But that wasn’t enough, and in his anxiety he found he couldn’t stop. He added a crescent moon to each piece. His hands still shook when they weren’t occupied, so he picked up the needle again and began adding to the one piece he could show off every day: a draping blood-red coat.

That was the next thing Mollymauk Tealeaf rushed to fill: the fabrics with which he draped himself. Every night that the fading feeling began to set in or he began to twitch with sourceless agitation, he picked up his needle and tethered himself to the here and now with that thick thread. He rendered all his favourite things with that thread: the moon in all its phases, stars, suns, flowers. He copied the symbols from the necklaces his friends clutched when they prayed, the patterns from the big tent. Every inch covered was a relief, like he could hold the emptiness at bay with thread alone.

He was good for a long time. His sense of self may have been half showmanship and half bullshit, but it was his. He only felt the pull of emptiness when he was alone, and he was almost never alone.

The first time that Yasha went off into a storm was agony. He begged Ornna to let him stay with her for the night and she agreed, thinking he was afraid of the thunder, but she didn’t hold him like Yasha did. And once the storm had passed on, she kicked him back to his own tent. He barely slept, huddled with only a blanket to keep him grounded.

The first nightmares came on one of those nights. He woke drenched in sweat, barely able to disentangle reality from fever dream.

The dreams had felt like memories. The details slipped through his fingers like sand when he tried to remember them, but he could still feel the themes: darkness, ambition, cruelty. Whoever had come before him was a terrible person, and he hated them with all of his being.

Staring down at his shaking hands, the red eyes stared back. Those eyes had been in the dreams, too, and the realization burned him like a hot coal. He dug at the marked skin with his nails, but could only scratch at the skin around the red oval. Purple skin ran red with blood, but the eye remained.

The blood on his clawed fingers erupted into ice crystals, red and menacing, and he fell back, breathing hard. He beat the frost away with the other hand, sobbing. His body felt not his own, and in his frenzy, he felt a visceral need to mark it. To make it his.

With a knife, he moved in a grisly mimicry of how he had marked his clothes. He cut his initials into his skin, and as the blood dripped from the final stroke, the knife too grew crimson ice crystals along its length. He threw it away, and huddled in the opposite corner.

He awoke to Yasha stroking his hair. Faint beams of sunlight filtered through tiny holes in the tent canvas. Both of his self-inflicted injuries were wrapped in white linen, and Yasha sang a quiet song in a chiming language he did not recognize.

They didn’t talk about it. Molly didn’t think he could, and Yasha, bless her, was far too polite to press. But when he practically sprinted to the tattoo parlour in the next town, she was stalwart in her support.

Like his coat, he slowly but methodically covered himself in images he loved. He was dismayed to find that the red eyes would not take ink any more than they could be removed from his skin, so he resigned himself to let the talented artists hide them among the petals of flowers and the scales of snakes. Sometimes, he even forgot they were there.

It was like this that he came to Trostenwald: filled up with whatever he could get his hands on, and unmistakably marked as his own person. A new town meant a new bunch of people to advertise to, and this was his favourite part of life.

Eyes clinged to him as he traipsed through the town with Yasha at his side. The gazes varied from curious to full of awe to distrustful, but every one of them lifted his soul. Well, except the occasional look of hatred from some racist bastard, but a quick flash of his fangs always sent them retreating hastily.

He spun through the streets handing out flyers to smallfolk. They looked the same in every town: muted earth tones, calloused hands, caution in their eyes.

That was, until he reached the inn.

The most interesting person Molly had ever met outside the carnival itself had been a merchant from Marquet, and that was half a lifetime ago. That merchant paled in comparison to who he found on the ground floor of the Nestled Nook Inn.

When he walked in the door, his jaw nearly dropped. Gathered together was a group that rivaled his own in terms of colour and variety: a green person with scars and armor, a blue person with horns and lace, a brown person with scars and an attitude that could be felt from across the room, a reddish person who seemed intent to implode in much the opposite way that Molly attempted to radiate, and a child? A halfling? They were wrapped from head to toe and wore a painted mask, and Molly just _had_ to know what was going on there.

Sliding into his showman persona like a well-worn costume, he sauntered over to the group.

“Well. I don't believe I've ever seen a group of people more in need of a good time in my entire life.”

Who knew that it would be the start of something completely new?

**Author's Note:**

> Imagine if poor, empty Molly had reached level 7 and found himself _actually_ walking on the Ethereal Plane. Could his poor, fragmented soul have handled it? Read my other story [Me and the Moonlight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27534175) and you might just find out!


End file.
